I was just thinking a few days ago how tv is a reflection of a series of fantasies that some women have.

Here in South America we have a few soaps, for instance, that detail the miraculous recovery of middle-aged women dumped by their asshole husbands. The women might be chubby and wrinkled, but of course some handsome 20 year old falls in love with them to the point of sacrificing all to be with them. Now, this happens in real life, or happened, I guess, but it merely seems like the fantasy of what should happen in a perfect world, according to the audience that watches these things.

Take grey's anatomy or the awful private practice. When I do watch, I end up asking the tv, SNL weekend-update style, Really? Now Really? Forty somethings living in an arrangement akin to a dorm? Working 5 hours a day, flirting with boys that desperately love them all day, learning a good lesson after all.... Yawn...

It may be that bed-hopping tarts IS what the public really wants. I don't know. Or maybe it's just an easy out for TV producers. I mean, if you can't make it good then paint it red... "sex sells," or so we are told.

I used to watch soaps. But that was back in the days of complex twists and turns resulting in anguish, depression, drinking, sobbing and tell-tale secrets to a best friend that always backfired taking apart an unauthorized infatuation or a full-blown case of love for a forbidden significant other. Now it's a clean and clear-cut race to see who hits the sheets first and the rest be damned. And why is it that female sex is the big seller? Aren't the men in there too being just as tarty as the women? (At least Boston Legal was honest about the whole thing.) Or is it a case of blaming the women for being too sexed up so, naturally, the men are forced to oblige? (Sounds like the Republicans when they blame the Democrats for some of their behavior...)

This nouveau mode of strumpets on parade only has so much to offer. And, like Chinese food it soon leaves one hungry for something else, so I don't watch soaps any more. Besides, the revolving door of actors was too distressing. The big thing about the old soaps was they were your extended family. You could count on familiar faces in a crunch. Any time you had the blues, you could switch on the telly and your best, understanding buds were right there with a tale worse than your own, so you felt better. If you aren't a bed-hopping tart yourself then there is nothing to hang your hat on. And the minute your favorite character suddenly exists into this uncharacteristic sexual behavior you feel betrayed and deserted. I remember the build-up to the first kiss with Luke and Laura. Man! was that hot or what?! I don't know how many viewers were hanging on the ropes for weeks waiting for that kiss but when it happened it was like Mt. St. Helena blowing her stack!

It used to be, too, that there was only one designated trollop per soap. Remember Delia on Ryan's Hope? Now the tables have turned and every soap is a Peyton Place with only one designated normy who has better thing to do with herself like pursue a career or be a good mom or too busy with school or too young to be caught in the web of an underbelly undercurrent of her town.

Soaps also used to be a terrific teaching tool for what not to do because you got to tune in and see the results of you own bad choices, if you so chose to choose them. But I found it too difficult to care about some character who was here today and gone tomorrow and whose only offering was that they were hot-to-trot while they passed through. See enough of that and it's like watching strangers in a turn-style in a NYC underground train station.

One would think with all of the drama that has been going on in D.C. in the last couple of decades, We the People would have higher interests than who is boffing whom in our daytime television. It seems like such a devolution of a once great culture. I can't help but wonder if this is truly what Americans want or is this the pied piper of Hollywood leading us down the path of unbridled smut dressed up as some kind of fun? I mean, once upon a time it was the mere suggestion of something off-color that made for heightened excitement. Now we just cut to the chase and go-for-it. Where's the fun in that? After so much debauchery, we don't even get to respect ourselves in the morning...

I also can't help but wonder if what's on TV is prompting some of the shocking behaviors we are seeing coming out or our angelic kids these days, too. I mean, if it's alright to sock it to your best friend's steady or fiance or husband on daytime TV, then what's wrong with a quickie in a middle school hallway at the end of the lockers between math and English? "It's no bid deal."

Personally, I want the cop and lawyer shows. I loved Ally McBeal. At least all of the boffing was amid much belly-laugh confusion between consenting adults after hours when the kiddies were abed. And I have never met an episode of L&O that didn't stop my spinning the dial searching for something to end the mental munchies. So, while some are watching the escapades of a stream of strangers indulging in carnal lust and finding some kind of probative value in it, there are some of us who, out of sheer boredom and self-preservation, will be reading a good book.

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How come we never see the grossly obese tricks with bad breath who don't bathe enough and are into lots and lots of anal stimulation foreplay? Because I'm sure quite a few guys who buy sex are either just like that, or possess other traits that are equally unpleasant for the average women.

Now, being a guy who has been with approximately a hundred and fifty women in his life, in addition to several marriages and more than a few living together arrangements of over a year's duration - I can say with complete certitude that it takes a minimum of 72 hours of shacking up to really appreciate a woman sexually. One or two hours, or even an over-nighter just doesn't cut it. So any guy who's going to be satisfied after one of these brief and rather expensive encounters is not going to be a happy camper afterward.

Take all of the above and add to it the fact that whores as a rule are dumb, often addicted to drugs and spiritually challenged on every level - then one has to accept that this show and all romanticized portrayals of prostitutes are pure, unadulterated bunk. This depiction of prostitutes is no more accurate than The Three Little Pigs is to pigs. It's just a lame fantasy.